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Frequent contributor Bennett Haselton writes "With the announcement of
Verizon's "six strikes plan"
for
movie pirates
(which includes reporting users to the RIAA and MPAA),
and content companies continuing to
sue users
en masse for peer-to-peer downloads,
I think it's inevitable that we'll see the rise of p2p software that proxifies your
downloads through other users.
In this model, you would not only download content from other users, but you also use other
users' machines as anonymizing proxies for the downloads, which
would make it impossible for third parties to identify the source or destination of the
file transfer. This would hopefully put an end to the era of movie studios subpoenaing ISPs for the
identities of end users and taking those users to court." Read below for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

Now, I'm not advocating the creation of software that enables piracy. And I don't
mean that in a nudge-wink kind of a way, I'm serious: I think people should reward movie studios
for making content that they like, if only because that means studios will make more
of that type of content. For my last cross-country flight I paid
an honest-to-God four dollars to download a movie from Amazon Unbox to watch on the plane,
even though I fondly like to think of myself as smart enough that I could have figured
out how to find and download the movie for free. (Well, not all that smart; the
movie was Lockout.)

However, the idea of users anonymizing each others' downloads is so elementary, that I literally mean
it's inevitable that we will see the rise of such software. Whether I'm in favor of it or not,
it's going to happen. In fact, under certain assumptions, there's really only one logical
direction that it can evolve in.

First, some background.
Under the current BitTorrent protocol -- with no built-in support for anonymization -- some server S
makes a large file available for download. When the first downloader, say user D1, requests
a copy of the file, they have to begin the process of downloading it from S.
But when the next downloader, say user D2, requests a copy of the same file while user D1 is
still downloading, the BitTorrent server S
tells D2 to start downloading the file from D1 instead of from S directly. (D1 is required at this
point to share out the file for download, in order to earn enough "credits" to continue downloading
from S.) Subsequent downloaders are
similarly told to download from other downloaders instead of from the original server S. In
this way, the server S avoids incurring massive bandwidth charges (since S only actually served the
file one time), and each user on average only has
to share out the file once in return for downloading it themselves.

Note that this still means that in order to initiate the download, the server S has to serve out
the whole file at least once, to the first downloader
-- and if the file is being distributed without the copyright owner's
permission, then the operators of server
S can be taken to court. This legal pressure was the reason that the Pirate Bay switched from serving BitTorrent
files to serving magnet links, which enable
users to download content purely from each other, without the Pirate Bay ever actually serving the
content themselves. But with both BitTorrent and magnet links, users who are downloading content from other
users, can see those other users' IP addresses -- and they know that those other users are serving
the content from files stored on their own hard drives. This means that if you're the copyright owner of that content,
you can subpoena the identities of the users behind those IP addresses, and taken them to court for
unauthorized possession
and distribution of copyrighted material.

So what would a protocol look like with built-in support for anonymization? In my first draft of an idea,
I thought that each download could take place using one intermediate user as a proxy, so that instead of
server S telling D2 to download from D1, the server would tell D2 to use download D3 as a proxy, and tell D3
to proxy the connection from D1. (As with BitTorrent, the downloader D3 would be required to allow their
machine to be used as a proxy, in order to earn credits to continue with their own download.) So D1
would not be able to see the IP address of user D2 downloading from them, and D2 would not be able to see
the IP address of user D1 that they were downloading from. Both of them would be able to see the IP address
of user D3 which is acting as the proxy between them,
but as long as it's not against the law to simply proxy a connection for someone else,
that would not be grounds to subpoena the user D3's identity. And D3 would be able to see the IP address
of D1 and D2, but if the D1 and D2 are communicating using a shared encryption key, then D3 would have no
idea what content is flowing between D1 and D2, even as it proxies the connection between them. So even
if one of D1, D2 or D3 were an "adversary" (i.e. a copyright holder intent on suing illegal file sharers),
none of the three would be able to see the IP address of another user that they knew was either downloading
particular content, or serving it out.

Of course you could also argue that if
D3 is among the users that server S is making available to others as an anonymizing proxy, then that constitutes
proof that D3 must be downloading something else from S (otherwise, D3 wouldn't need to earn credits by
acting as an anonymizing proxy), and if either D1 or D2 is an adversary, they can see D3's IP address and reason
that D3 must be guilty of some copyright violation. Similarly, if D3 is the adversary, they can see
D1 and D2's IP addresses and reason that both of them are probably guilty of some copyright infraction,
even if D3 can't actually see what they're trading. Basically, anybody could be considered "guilty by association"
simply by virtue of being in the community of users being coordinated by server S.
But (1) that accusation could be deflected if some of the files being served by S were
in fact legal and being distributed with the copyright holder's permission; and (2) in any case, the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
requires you to claim that your specific copyrighted content is being distributed by a user, before
you can unmask that user's identity; it's not enough to claim that the user is part of a network that
distributes "some" copyrighted content illegally. D3 may be proxying a connection between D1 and D2 in order
to earn credits so that D3 can download some content for themselves, but even though D1 and D2 can both
see D3's IP address, there's no way for them to know what D3 could be downloading.

Unfortunately, this three-user-chain idea is not secure, because an adversary could still create a large number
of users co-ordinated through server S, and sooner or later, a chain would arise where both the proxy and
the downloader controlled by the adversary, and at that point, they would know the IP address of the user
serving out the copyrighted content. In other words, eventually you'll get a situation where D2 is downloading
content from D1 by going through proxy D3 -- but where D2 and D3 are both controlled by the adversary. So D2 knows
the content that's being downloaded via D3, and D3 knows the IP address of D1 that's actually serving out
the content -- at which point they can subpoena the identity of user D1, and sue them.

So consider this idea instead: When user D1 sends a request to server S to download a file, server S gives them
the IP address of another user, D2, from which they can download the file. Now, 40% of the time, user D2
actually does have the file on their hard drive and is serving it to user D1, with no proxying. The
other 60% of the time, user D2 is told by S to proxy the connection from D1 and connect to a third user, D3.
Now in 40% of these cases, D3 actually does have the file and is serving it out directly; the other 60%
of the time, D3 is proxying the connection for yet another user, D4...

So you end up with chains of varying length, with longer chains having a progressively smaller probability of forming:

40% of chains will be of length 1 (one user downloads directly from another)
60% x 40% of chains (24%) will be of length 2
60% x 60% x 40% of chains (14.4%) will be of length 3
60% x 60% x 60% x 40% of chains (8.64%) will be of length 4
etc.

These proportions of course sum to 1, and a little math shows that the length of the average chain is 3.5 nodes.
The number of downloads in a chain -- the connections between users -- is one less than the number of nodes
in the chain, so this means that to complete one download, the content will have to be transferred an average
of 2.5 times -- compared to being transferred only once, when one user downloads from another directly. In order
to ensure that users contribute enough to the system as they take from it, that means that in order to download
a file, users would be required to provide enough "proxying" to support the equivalent of 2.5 full downloads of
that same file.

These chains have a useful property: any time you're downloading content "from" another user, there's only a 40%
chance that user is serving content off of their own hard drive, and a 60% chance that they're proxying the
connection from somewhere else (another node that may in turn be proxying the connection from yet another node, etc.).
So even if the adversary controls three nodes D1, D2, and D3, and D1 is downloading from D2 who is downloading from D3
who is downloading from D4 (and D4 is not controlled by the adversary), from the adversary's point of view there's
only a 40% chance that D4 is actually originating the content. This is always true no matter how many nodes in
the chain the adversary controls -- in the end, if they want to nail someone for serving out copyrighted content,
they have to download the content from some node that they don't control, and there will only be a
40% that user is actually serving the content from their hard drive.

And the 40% number was deliberately chosen in order to weaken the adversary's legal grounds for subpoenaing the identity
of the user they're downloading from -- even if they can show that they downloaded content from another
user's IP address, it's more likely than not that the other user was not actually hosting the content.
(Of course, there might be other details in context that render that probability calculation useless. For example,
if the server S only links to one downloadable file, then all users coordinated by that server S are presumably
downloading that same file, and anybody that server S connects you to, can be presumed guilty of downloading and
sharing that file, 40% figure be damned.)

At this point you might also wonder: Why not just connect over a protocol like Tor, which provides secure anonymity for
all transactions, and then use BitTorrent or some other file-sharing system on top of that? The answer is that Tor's
connection is likely to be much slower, for at least two reasons. First,
Tor servers are a limited resource, and the more people use
them (especially for large file trading), the slower they are likely to become. (By contrast, in the peer-to-peer
proxying model outlined above, every new downloader can also be made to act as a proxy for other users, so additional
users don't slow down the system because they contribute as much as they take out of it.) Second, Tor always
routes your connection through multiple servers to guarantee secure anonymity, which means it would be slower on average
than the variable-length chains described above, where only about 20% of chains are of length 4 or more.

The key difference is that Tor provides true anonymity whereas the protocol above only provides plausible
deniability. In high-risk settings where Tor is often used, it would not be acceptable if there were a 40% chance
of your IP address being revealed to your adversary. But for file sharing, the 40% figure might be acceptable
if it's just low enough to stave off a subpoena. This trade-off makes it possible to use shorter chains, resulting
in faster downloads and less total bandwidth consumption.

You also already have the option today of using a VPN service to download files through an anonymous third-party connection,
which renders the rest of these issues moot. But users have to jump through several hoops (and pay some money) to set this
up as an option, which means that most users will not be using VPNs any time soon, leaving plenty of naive users for
the RIAA and MPAA to go after. The use of peer-proxying links would mean that all users downloading through the
system would be protected.

At the moment, the major impediment to a peer-proxying system like this would be that the chained downloads would still consume an
average of 2.5 as much bandwidth as direct peer-to-peer downloads. Even with today's high-speed connections,
this increase in inconvenience is great enough that some users might just prefer to use plain old BitTorrent
to download files directly from peers, and run the (admittedly small) risk of getting in trouble. But as bandwidth
speeds continue to grow literally exponentially, eventually the difference in inconvenience will be so small,
that users would be foolish not to use proxified downloads if it provided free legal protection.

Note that the viability of this system does depend on the ISP's attitude towards it. In particular, if your
ISP only goes after pirates because of legal pressure from content holders, then if the ISP's users are using
this peer-proxying protocol instead of a direct download protocol like BitTorrent, then the ISP can quite
truthfully claim that they don't have any hard evidence to disconnect any particular users or turn over
their identities (because the ISP doesn't know
which users are actually storing pirated files and which users are just acting as proxies).
On the other hand, if your
ISP sincerely wants to stop piracy
because your ISP is also a content company (Comcast, for example), then
they might also try to squelch the use of any protocol that enables piracy, even if they can't prove that
any particular users are using it for anything illegal. Thus Comcast might try to slow the use of the peer-proxy
protocol. But in that case they could be forced by Net Neutrality regulations to stop throttling it, in the same way that
the FCC ordered Comcast
to stop throttling BitTorrent.

As long as those conditions hold true -- content owners continue cracking down on file sharers, but proxying
remains legal and bandwidth keeps getting cheaper, and ISPs are restrained from blocking the protocols themselves
-- I think that p2p will have to evolve into something like the
chained-download system described above, to provide plausible deniability to users, without resorting to the
long chains (and subsequently slower downloads) provided by full-anonymity systems like Tor.

But again, I'm just saying it's inevitable, not that it's right.
I actually do wish that people would pay
the studios' prices for the movies that they watch; part of it is that I think most blockbusters
are actually pretty good and deserve to make money.
When you refuse to pay for movies, you're casting a vote against fun, big-budget movies that are made
for the purpose of getting lots of people to come see them and enjoy them, and instead voting
in favor of excruciatingly boring low-budget films that are made primarily so that the director could whine that the cheese-puff-snarfing
American public wouldn't know great art if it bit them on their big bloated behind and subsequently
didn't even buy enough tickets for the director to pay off the lien he took out on his Honda
Civic to get the movie produced.
Forget prosecution and civil suits; just make movie pirates sit through The Brown Bunny.

Retroshare is great, but it's limited by the number of friends you have. You only ever connect to people you have an established friend relationship with. If you only have one friend, it doesn't matter how many seeders there are for a file, it will never go faster than your friend's upload speed.

The RIAA and MPAA have declared war on their customers, despite having several surveys which show that downloaders do NOT affect Movies , that Downloaders buy MORE music. The RIAA and MPAA have been shown in several court cases they DO NOT support artisits, and are only concerned in lining their own pockets.Copy Right INFRIGMENT IS A CIVIL issue, and yet Kim DotCom of MEga Upload, Several music sites have all been taken down by USA government Agencies with the co-operation of by USA diplomatic pressure.And yet not a single one of these site take downs has resulted in a single court case. All previous web sites have been given back to the original owner of the web sites except Kim DotCom, who has still not been charged, or given any list of laws he has broken.As a USA Citizen I am ashamed of my government's corruption and usurption by corporate greed, and now the US courts won't even allow us citizens to use the Freedom of Information Act to determine whether I as a citizen am being watched or not.So yes I see this as a necessary and good protection from a government I FEAR will prosecute me, as it did Arron Aschwatz, and others like him who are serving sentances in Jail, or being extradited from the UK to the USA.I can proudly say that I have NOT voted for Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, or Barak Obama, or any other current incumbent, so as far as I am concerned this is NOTHING BUT GOOD.

I see the ridiculous attempt at equating piracy with theft has shown its ugly head again. This idea is bad for everyone any only serves to obstruct actual debate about the ethics behind intellectual property. People who post information about breaking the law (it isn't even the law everywhere by the way so don't just assume American laws should be enforced worldwide) are never going to be ashamed because the reason they post the information in the first place is because they disagree with the existence of the law. The law is not the law because it is morally right. The law is the law because of pressure from lobby groups.

If you are "proxying" connection, then you are downloading from user D1 and uploading to D2. It does not matter if you are not retaining that data, you are still copying stuff illegally. So in the end if content owners are unable to determine identity of actual downloaders, they can go for proxying users and hit them with exactly the same lawsuit.

AHAH! Then clearly the answer to the problem for content owners is to just sue all ISP's! Since, for end users to download copyrighted content, the ISP's infrastructure and many other ISP's infrastructure who merely route between must copy and reupload that data dozens of times for each packet! Why sue the users who requested the files? Since the lawsuits award damages based on the number of copies you make, sue the ISP's since they make dozens of copies for every copy a user tries to obtain!

(a) Transitory Digital Network Communications.— A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider’s transmitting, routing, or providing connections for, material through a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, or by reason of the intermediate and transient storage of that material in the course of such transmitting, routing, or providing connections, if—

(1) the transmission of the material was initiated by or at the direction of a person other than the service provider;

(2) the transmission, routing, provision of connections, or storage is carried out through an automatic technical process without selection of the material by the service provider;

(3) the service provider does not select the recipients of the material except as an automatic response to the request of another person;

(4) no copy of the material made by the service provider in the course of such intermediate or transient storage is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to anyone other than anticipated recipients, and no such copy is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to such anticipated recipients for a longer period than is reasonably necessary for the transmission, routing, or provision of connections; and

(5) the material is transmitted through the system or network without modification of its content.

The only question is whether you as an individual can qualify as a "service provider", but if the EFF's interpretation is correct, anyone falling into the above exemption would inherently qualify.

That said, I would not want to be the person who was being sued over using such a service. You'd presumably have to convince a judge that your purpose for using the software in the first place was something other than engaging in or facilitating copyright infringement.... Good luck with that.

That's what I wonder. If proxy services are not classified as service providers, the government could in theory come after you for conspiracy or possibly RICO statutes.

If proxy services are classified as service providers, expect that laws regarding logging and auditing be ramped up. Every TCP connection you make will be saved and stored for a long time. Even if you bounce across seven proxies, the logs will eventually point back to the client. They could easily require little more than an administrativ

Safe harbor provisions were exactly what I wanted to mention, and also as you mentioned, you have to be acting in good faith which may be hard to prove. What business or technical need is satisfied for legitimate users of the technology by proxying through peers? Proxying is only more useful for obfuscation as it is less efficient for actual data transfer (limited now by relay speed as well, increased complexity with a need for intelligent proxy selection). Maybe for NAT bypass, but that's about it, and it

But I don't think its necessary to reach that conclusion in order to go after the proxy provider any more than it is necessary to equate a drug mule to a licensed Bus Line like Greyhound.

The difference is more like people borrowing each others cars which just happened to contain some pot that belonged to someone else "I'm just transporting it for them, I didn't know what was in the box".

That said, I would not want to be the person who was being sued over using such a service. You'd presumably have to convince a judge that your purpose for using the software in the first place was something other than engaging in or facilitating copyright infringement.... Good luck with that.

Retroshare, in addition to being a darknet file sharing app has encrypted equivalents of email, IM, IRC, web forums, status feeds, VOIP, and probably more that I'm forgetting.

You'd presumably have to convince a judge that your purpose for using the software in the first place was something other than engaging in or facilitating copyright infringement.... Good luck with that.

I would argue that unless they can prove what I've been sharing or downloading on the service was copyright infringement, I think they haven't got a case - it doesn't matter if the majority of users are downloading copyrighted items, what should matter is whether there is reasonable doubt that I was downloading copyrighted material. Essentially, "innocent until proven guilty".

If you have no control over the data being transported through you as often is the case with these darknet programs you are probably protected by the same DCMA provisions that protect the ISPs. That is, until they change the law. But then again you can make it in a way that never a complete file passes through you, and data never stays within your system.

Not necessarily. Keep in mind they never go after "doanloaders", only uploaders. It's just that with torrents, they've made the argument that everyone in the swarm is an uploader.

Also, if 2 people share a file, there are several nodes between them that also share that file, but no one is ever sued except the end user. With a place like Torrent tracker sites, they've made the argument that they of course know they're trading illegal files, that they have received take-down requests and ignored them. Even places like Youtube are expected to ban things on request.

Now enter proxy torrenting. Who do they send a take-down request to? Even if they can pin an upload to a specific address, they need to show that you knew you were trading "The Avengers" which you almost certainly didn't.

Intent plays into that. If I engage in an act (that in itself is not illegal) that I unknowingly facilitate an illegal act, I'm generally going to get off. However, if I engage in that same act and I know it will facilitate an illegal act, then I'm now generally accountable as well.

Let me simplify the law for you:If you are not a media company, you are guilty of piracy.If you are a large American company, you can just pay off and charge your customers more.In all other cases, you are screwed.

If you are "proxying" connection, then you are downloading from user D1 and uploading to D2. It does not matter if you are not retaining that data, you are still copying stuff illegally. So in the end if content owners are unable to determine identity of actual downloaders, they can go for proxying users and hit them with exactly the same lawsuit.

The FA says the traffic sent over the proxy is encrypted, so there would be no evidence it was copyrighted material.

Traffic could be already encrypted between endpoints without inserting proxy in the middle, so it does not change anything.. Honestly, idea of adding a proxy is just weak attempt at finding legal loophole by splitting responsibility. Piratebay guys and Grokster (see MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.) got convicted for providing file sharing tools that happened to be used also for copyright infringement. Do you seriously expect that "I don't know and I don't care what I was proxying" defense will work? J

If you are "proxying" connection, then you are downloading from user D1 and uploading to D2. It does not matter if you are not retaining that data, you are still copying stuff illegally. So in the end if content owners are unable to determine identity of actual downloaders, they can go for proxying users and hit them with exactly the same lawsuit.

Copying data from storage into RAMISPs (all along the pipe from your house to the server) copying data into buffers for routingDefragging your hard drive, copying data from one sector to another

All of these examples are just as silly as what you claim is infringement.

Have you never used a BitTorrent client? Do you not know how to use Google or Wikipedia? GP is correct that the BitTorrent protocol splits files into "chunks," with peers sharing those chunks amongst themselves.

Unless you have citations otherwise, the copyright suits thus far have worked by identifying all the IP addresses in a swarm, subpoenaing their ISPs, and then sending settlement letters or suing. There's nothing magical about downloading 50.1% of a movie, or whatever the heck "majority of data representing a torrent" means.

Didn't they already try to sue the proxy user for something like this. You aren't off the hook legally just because you disguise who you are dealing with. All I see this doing is having them shifting from suing the download'er to the proxy'er.

There are technicalities on both sides, but the idea of using proxies does imply a certain amount of expected of privacy (similar to using a vpn) which can be enough in some countries to have these lawsuits dropped or thrown out.

Didn't they already try to sue the proxy user for something like this. You aren't off the hook legally just because you disguise who you are dealing with. All I see this doing is having them shifting from suing the download'er to the proxy'er.

Plausible deniability. Probably not the best defense, because its still going to cost you lots of money to defend yourself.

However if ALL Bittorrent clients had proxying built in and turned on by default, and if none of them provided any logging, then plausible deniability could probably be used as a defense. But only if the provider of the proxy was clueless as to the proxy's existence on his machine. If you have to go out of your way to install a proxy your intent becomes pretty clear.

If this is implemented, then pro-copyright extremists will argue that running or using a proxy is prima facae evidence of criminality and then lobby hard to make it illegal. Result? Anybody with a legitimate (or illegal but ethically necessary) reason to use a proxy will lose out.

The OPs' hope that the pro-copyright extremists won't fight back hard, with legislation to ban proxies, or force China-style "real ID" laws on Internet users, is naive at best, and ultimately, dangerous.

While they may indeed lobby for such, it actually already is illegal. If you copy the data, you are infringing copyright, even if you don't keep the copy. Only reason the ISPs don't get hit with this as is is the DMCA protects them.

If you copy the data, you are infringing copyright, even if you don't keep the copy. Only reason the ISPs don't get hit with this as is is the DMCA protects them.

But is merely accepting a packet and sending it on actually a copy? It you retain nothing that was sent thru your proxy, how can there be a "copy". Like unknowingly passing a counterfeit dollar bill, its arguably not a crime.No one claims that Viewing a Movie that you purchased on a DVD constitutes copying even though we know the data is copied thru disk buffers, cached in ram, sent on to video buffers and displayed on the screen.

Proxies would / should be chosen explicitly to exclude those already seeding

As other people have posted, it's not infringing to "copy" the data as part of the network transmission, and the part of copyright law that says it's not infringing wasn't part of the changes that are commonly referred to as the "DMCA".

So, although TFS has some horrible errors when describing the current bittorrent protocol, there could be changes made to it where every node becomes a proxy for torrents that the node isn't actually uploading/downloading. This means that a honeypot set up by the MPAA would

The only way that has any chance of wining the fight is by forcing them to take more and more extreme measures until enough people are pissed with them.

ha ha ha ha ha! I can't even get my wife riled up over not being able to fast forward through the previews on purchased DVDs. Probably 95% of people just don't give a shit about this stuff. The only reason people learned about SOPA was because of the blackout.

TSA, warrant-less wiretapping, extraordinary renditions, seizing domain names, convicting weev, DUI checkpoints, etc. There is no such thing measures extreme enough for people to be pissed. And even when we do get pissed, we get a month long OWS moveme

I was researching this weekend, I can't seem to find out if the project is still alive. It looked well designed in 2010, and I'm not sure if it's using the Tor network (bad), or just the Tor protocol for its own network( good).

What'll happen is the studios will continue to sue and subpoena the information for the machines that they see connecting to the torrent. They'll argue that it's the owners of those machines responsible for any use of their machines by others. They'll continue to use these tactics as long as the courts make it cheap for them to file and lose. That won't end until the courts start ruling that the studios know they don't have grounds for these suits and start dismissing them with prejudice and sanctioning the plaintiffs without a defendant having to do anything. Maybe the courts starting to refuse to let the plaintiffs withdraw their claims after a defendant's responded, forcing the plaintiffs to face an adverse judgement and sanctions, might stop them too, but my money's on the studios in that case betting that too few defendants will have the resources to gamble on winning that show-down.

All the studios need to do to quash this idea is to successfully argue in court that volunteering to act as a proxy host is comparable to hosting the file yourself. That does not seem like a hard argument to make. Don't the copyrighted bits have to pass through the proxy host's machine? That sounds like "distribution" to me.

Maybe someone creates a malicious software targeted @ Verizon customers.It would download RIAA monitored torrents at very low bandwidth in order to be unnoticeable to the average user.It could download at least 6 torrents in 1 month which would result in disconnection of service.Lets say the attackers have a database of Verizon customer e-mails and a good method for exploitation of Windows O.S.Seems like one could put Verizon out of business if they are so keen on upholding their 'Six Strikes' plan.

You mean make everyone responsible for everyone's downloading. You wouldn't be eliminating the lawsuits, you'd just enable them to sue everyone who was in the proxy pool, for much higher amounts than they can even now.

This sounds too much like, "it's OK to rob a bank, because you're just taking the bank's money. You're not stealing from any people."

the ISP can quite truthfully claim that they don't have any hard evidence to disconnect any particular users or turn over their identities

Does it work that way? I mean, my ISP can tell I'm sharing something that under current law I do not have a right to share. Is my 'get out of jail' card really as simple as, yes, but I don't know who I'm sharing it with?

On the other end, my ISP can tell I'm downloading something that under current law I do not have a right to download, but it's all good, because no one can say for sure who I'm downloading from?

To go back to the bank robbing analogy--and I don't mean to equate copyright infringement with stealing,but--let's say I bust my way in to a bank, crack open the safe, and the next day money is missing. Would I feel comfortable going to court with the defense, "yes, I got in to the bank, and in to the safe, and the money is missing, but you can't prove I took the money?" I don't think I like that defense.

So in this case, "yes, I uploaded your movie, but you can't prove who I uploaded it to." I don't think so. I also don't think not being able to prove who received the bits I sent is the same as not being able to prove that someone received those bits.

There was no effort to identify who Jammie Thomas uploaded files to, only that she made the files available from her computer for others to download. I don't see that changing anytime soon, so identifying who the downloader might be is unimportant, only that there are files being offered for download.

I also tend to agree that No Good Can Possibly Come From Piracy. I have seen plenty of justifications like the studios are making plenty of money as it is even with rampant piracy and the Star Trek justificat

(I'm not sure I entirely agree with this statement yet but I'm just putting it out there)

What happens is that media production stops becoming a viable industry and a vehicle of corporate cultural oppression tanks with it. The entire notion of manufactured popular culture and its method of control over people dissipates. Movies, music, stop becoming things for mass consumption, a relic notion of an industrial-revolution-scarcity mindset and become personal, meaningful again. People really want something i

This is the kind of talk that will spur DMCA2. Where only authorized computers with sufficient limitations, forced ISP activity reporting and government backdoors will be allowed to connect to the internet.

Because the current markets and business models developed around our old IP laws are more sacred than the natural development of technological innovation.

When you refuse to pay for movies, you're casting a vote against fun, big-budget movies that are made for the purpose of getting lots of people to come see them and enjoy them, and instead voting in favor of excruciatingly boring low-budget films that are made primarily so that the director could whine that the cheese-puff-snarfing American public wouldn't know great art if it bit them on their big bloated behind and subsequently didn't even buy enough tickets for the director to pay off the lien he took out on his Honda Civic to get the movie produced.

Secondly, I'm casting a vote against not being able to use the media I purchased in the manner I want, on whatever device I want for as long as I want.

I buy DVDs (okay, usually on sale) and rip them, because all of the legal digital versions available suck lame sauce in terms of DRM crap. If I'm feeling too lazy to rip it myself, I have no compunctions about grabbing a torrent.

First let me say that I legitimately use Bit torrent and similar programs to download (and reshare) perfectly legal things like Knoppix and other open sores software. I have had to limit my use, being a victim of the AT&T monopoly I'm subject to the data caps even for my DSL land line, so no more leaving the torrent up for a month to help share new software after it is released.

I sure don't want my IP address associated in any way with crap like copies of the latest jar-jar movie from the hack who lied to us about Lost (illegal or legal copies). And I don't want my traffic to skyrocket to move that junk even when I didn't download it myself, just so some warez freaks can try to hide from the entertainment mafia. And if I chose to run software that knowingly routed such traffic through my computer, then I completely expect that the courts owned by the entertainment mafia would decide that I acted in collusion with the people who uploaded and downloaded the questionable files and that I was an accomplice.

Note that this still means that in order to initiate the download, the server S has to serve out the whole file at least once, to the first downloader -- and if the file is being distributed without the copyright owner's permission, then the operators of server S can be taken to court. This legal pressure was the reason that the Pirate Bay switched from serving BitTorrent files to serving magnet links, which enable users to download content purely from each other, without the Pirate Bay ever actually serving the content themselves.

This shows a basic misunderstanding of how BitTorrent works.

TPB never had any copyrighted content files on their servers ever. They served up.torrent files which were files that pointed to trackers for the content files being shared.

Now they use magnet files, which allows users to get.torrent files from other users instead of from TPB.

You're going to deploy a technology that will threaten the profits of the corporations that can can get statutes enacted definining "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors" as "the entire life of the author plus 75 frikkin' years to an estate" - and you expect the government they own won't come down on you like a ton of bricks? You expect technical merit and plausible deniability to even be a factor here?

Then you want everything in the same encrypted network and the lion's share of the usage of that network to be legitimate. Although BitTorrent over TOR is currently abusive of the TOR network, it would be better to find a means of making BitTorrent tolerable to TOR (or vice-versa) than to create a separate encrypted filesharing network.

When this all gets tested in a courtroom, it is far better for an encrypted network to appear to be protecting privacy than to enable lawbreaking. The difference between the two is just how closely the type of data over the encrypted network matches the type of data sent over the unencrypted Internet. Better to encourage the use of TOR to everybody than to have one encrypted network for privacy advocates and another made 99% of pirates -- the latter service lowers the bar for legal decisions and laws to be made that can then ruin all encrypted networks in general.

This legal pressure was the reason that the Pirate Bay switched from serving BitTorrent files to serving magnet links, which enable users to download content purely from each other, without the Pirate Bay ever actually serving the content themselves.

The Pirate Bay still serves torrents.

For a file with few seeders, the torrent is linked on the website.Once the # of seeders reaches a certain threshold, the torrent link is removed.BUT, the torrent is still on the server and can still be accessed if you take 30 seconds to figure out the formatting of the torrent names.

Note that this still means that in order to initiate the download, the server S has to serve out the whole file at least once, to the first downloader -- and if the file is being distributed without the copyright owner's permission, then the operators of server S can be taken to court. This legal pressure was the reason that the Pirate Bay switched from serving BitTorrent files to serving magnet links, which enable users to download content purely from each other, without the Pirate Bay ever actually serving the content themselves.

Not at all. The person you're labeling as "server S" here would be more appropriately called the "initial seeder". Every individual that is participating in a swarm but has the entire torrent being shared is a seeder. The initial seeder is, generally, the person first making the file available. BitTorrent doesn't treat them any differently from any other seeder, though.

There are two kinds of servers in a BitTorrent network: a tracker and an index. The trackers are actually part of the BitTorrent protocol. T

At this point, TPB is nothing more than a very specialized version of Slashdot, where instead of getting submissions that contain links to other websites, the user submissions are links to interesting files that aren't hosted via HTTP.

Anyone else noticed that movies are getting smaller? From 4.4GB for all 720p movies, 3GB-ish files are now increasingly common. Games too are abandoning the relic of the pile-o-rars in favor of more space-efficient schemes. It's the pressure of bandwidth quotas and the need to get back underground: Pirates are investing more time in compression.

The interesting thing about that is the quality has not really dropped by much, not enough to really complain about. I suppose it's due to more use of VBR and multi-pass encoding. I tried to set that stuff up once, it's a pain and (at the time) had a lot more bugs. I suppose it's finally getting a bit more usable.

Multi-pass encoding actually went out of fashion in favor of quality-based encoding - crf on x264. It's as good as multipass (I know, I've tested it) with the one downside of not actually knowing how big your file will be until it's done.

I've been working for a long time on an extensive guide to getting the absolute best out of x264. It's a long way from done yet. In particular I've yet to run extensive experimental encodes on the subq parameter - common wisdom says higher is better, but I want to know more

TPB never served up content, not ever, when it was serving up torrent links and has been pointed out they DO still serve LINKS. The "S" in his summary is typified incorrectly. In his example "S" is characterized as TPB, it's not. Instead "S" is the first USER who has submitted a torrent link to the TRACKER. The tracker never, not ever, not even once, passes any of the actual content information thru it. The Tracker simply tells the first person that asks for it how to contact the USER who has offered up the

In addition, if I were a movie studio and a connection were proxied through a user's machine in the manner that he appears to be advocating rather than directly to a consuming user I'd still sue the proxy. My argument would be that the proxy did indeed download the content - and I'd be right. Never mind that the data was "just" passed along,

That "never mind" doesn't apply, as copyright law says that if you are just a transit, you aren't infringing. Otherwise, the MPAA could just sue everyone who has any sort of router, switch, firewall, or other network equipment. There is nothing special about being an "ISP" that prevents them from being sued for this...it's the fact that the transient nature of the data (even if temporarily cached) makes it by definition not infringing.

And, if this scheme was applied, you would see programs that do the pro

If you think this will stop anything, you haven't been paying attention to the litigation. Copyright trolls don't care if you did the downloading or not. Already, wihtout proxies they cannot identify who it was who did the downloading, as it could have been a friend, spouse, child, neighbor, or hacker... anyone who had access to the Internet connection accused of doing the downloading.

This proxy business changes nothing. The subpoenas and settlement letters are worded such that they scare you into settli

As has already been pointed out, the submitter doesn't seem to understand the bittorrent protocol. Three minutes with google would have sufficed for such understanding.

The scheme is not fundamentally different from Tor or I2p or ANts P2P in concept. The reason Tor/I2p/ANtsP2P BT swarms have not caught on and become dominant already is not because no one has bothered to write such an application or because they do not provide sufficient plausible deniability, but because all such schemes are inherently slow.

Actually how the Disney party is bought and paid for by the MPAA, creation of such software will be a TERRORIST act and allow them to do Drone strikes inside the USA against Internet Terrorist suspected locations.

I doubt they would even need new legislation. They will just argue that all the nodes are participating in sharing copyrighted works and will sue random people they manage to identify. They do not even need a good case since defending yourself is generally cost prohibitive anyway.

This whole idea is a non-solution.... it is kinda like those guides for 'why you do not have to actually pay taxes' or 'you are not technically a citizen of the US and thus the law does not apply'... even if mathmatically the logic might make sense, once it hits actual courtrooms it falls apart.

First - I am the 'responsible party' for my ISP connection. Regardless of whether I'm proxying for other people or doing the torrenting myself, they still come to MY house to ask questions. Just ask any TOR exit node operator.

Second - in the obligatory car analogy, if my car is seen as the getaway car from a bank robbery, they're going to come talk to me about where I was at the time. If I had reported my car stolen or I have a rock solid alibi to my whereabouts I'm not going to be charged.

I'm responsible for the actions of something under my control, be it a car or an internet connection. The key question is am I LIABLE for those same actions.

A license plate like an IP address alone is not enough to identify an individual. The circumstances become very very important. Most specifically the obvious differences between civil crimes like most copyright infringement and criminal ones like the above bank robberies.

This is true enough, but your "car fleeing a bank robbery" example is a criminal case with police investigating.

Copyright (when it comes to music/movies, at least) tends to be a civil case against the MPAA/RIAA members and the individual who is accused of infringing the copyright. You could be totally innocent of infringement, but the MPAA/RIAA sees you as guilty and is willing to pay the legal fees to make an example of you. You, on the other hand, have limited funds and time. So if you are sued and fac

It wasn't circumstantial. It was a confession that the car was lent, and an ironclad alibi for the time of the robbery that got him the murder conviction. Felony inclusion rule. He was liable enough for his car that lending it got him a murder conviction. So yes, liability follows objects in some pretty absurd ways. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Holle [wikipedia.org]

"Holle, who had given the police statements in which he seemed to admit knowing about the burglary, was convicted on August 3, 2004, of first-degree murder under a legal doctrine known as the felony murder rule." - wikipedia

SO, he didn't "lend his car to someone going to the store", he lent his car to someone going to a burglary.

I honestly don't see how this would even evade the copyright laws and DMCA (however, IANAL, so I may be missing something).One big problem with this scheme is that it isn't really anonymous. Let's suppose D2 is an MPAA/RIAA agent: he finds a.torrent he wants to download, and server S directs him to D3, which acts as a proxy to download it from D1. Well D1 is probably safe, since D3 is covering for him, and D2 (the agent) can't see D1's IP address. However, D3 is not safe! Sure, he's passing the data in

Here is even more radical idea: all zeros and all ones are the same anyway. So let proxy users send you just one 0 and 1, then you can duplicated them as needed and assemble (or not) into some file. Think about bandwidth savings - not matter how long is the file, it can be sent in just two bits!

the 1's and 0's aren't anonymous, only the ultimate source of the 1's and 0's. every one or zero sent to you through a torrent must still have the information describing in which part of which file it it belongs.

Pedos are already using Tor and Freenet to exchange their filth online. I suppose they might take advantage of it, but I don't think it's nearly as safe as Tor or Freenet are for staying anonymous.

What I would worry about is having my IP associated with child pornography, terrorism, or whatever due to proxied content being chained through my home connection. People have been raided for hosting Tor exit nodes before.

Freenet is safe from that: It's got no connectivity outside the network, so anyone able to connect to your node has to be familiar enough with the network not to make such an easy mistake. Tor exit nodes are the really risky things to run.

you lose a lot of your ability to catch certain elements of "crime" when you introduce any form of anonymity. Anonymity will be used by people that want privacy, people that are paranoid, people that want to whistleblow, harass, defraud, threaten, etc. You will get the good with the bad.

Unfortunately, we seem to be headed in the direction that NO bad is allowed, so we are supposed to be OK with giving up all the good.

As a basic example, you can't punish or prevent all slander while allowing whistleblowing. The concept of allowing truly anonymous good behavior while preventing anonymous bad behavior is an impossible goal.

Normally one would expect "innocent until proven guilty" to take precedence and allow anonymous behavior while tolerating difficulty in catching criminals, but there are currently just too many well-funded groups with a stake that push the legislation in the other direction.

In theory this works, in practice, with average home user being lucky to have 5-10mbps down 1-5mbps up, this won't be worth it. I do see people talking about fiber to home, once we have and 100mbps internet connections, they we can possible revisit this solution.

Add to this crappy monthly bandwidth restrictions and you will be able to download one movie a month as rest of the bandwidth will go for proxying torrents for others.

I am surprised no one mentioned I2P earlier as it does things very similarly to how the writer describes.

Ultimately though, the solution is to stop giving people money who will turn around and use that money to enslave you, threaten you, or coerce you. A dollar not spent on the movie or music industry is a dollar spent for freedom.